Senior Vice President of Retail John Browett is leaving the company, and Apple is already underway with a search for his replacement. During the transition period, Apple's Retail team will report directly to CEO Tim Cook.

Also on his way out is Senior Vice President of iOS Software Scott Forstall. Forstall will leave the company next year and will serve as an advisor to Cook until his exit.

Browett had only been with the company since January of this year. He came to Apple after being the CEO of European tech retailer Dixons Retail. Browett also held the CEO title at Tesco.com once upon a time.

Forstall, on the other hand, is a long-time Apple man. He started with the company in 1997 and is credited as being one of the original architects behind Mac OS X. In 2006, he became responsible for OS releases (his work in this role included Leopard).

The shakeups mean more responsibility will be placed onto other high-level management such as Jony Ive, Bob Mansfield, Eddy Cue, and Craig Federighi. Ive will lead Human Interface work across the company in addition to his Industrial Design duties. Cue will add Siri and Maps to the other online services he oversees. Federighi will take over both iOS and OS X, while Mansfield will lead a new group called Technologies. According to the press release, this "combines all of Apple’s wireless teams across the company in one organization, fostering innovation in this area at an even higher level."

Promoted Comments

Not a surprise to see Browett pushed out of the door with alacrity. The biggest surprise was that he was appointed in the first place, as the hordes of UK commenters noted when he got the job. Looks like Forstall decided to move on gradually.

126 Reader Comments

Not a surprise to see Browett pushed out of the door with alacrity. The biggest surprise was that he was appointed in the first place, as the hordes of UK commenters noted when he got the job. Looks like Forstall decided to move on gradually.

Bye John!! Don't let the door hit you on the way out!Forstall probably got booted for the Maps issues which sort of sucks but understandable since the software wasn't ready for many people. (I love it personally).EDIT: (link)http://daringfireball.net/2012/10/forstall_out I also forgot about Siri, which really requires an iphone5 and LTE to work acceptably. It is awful on my wife's 4S.

Yup, Dixons wasnt' exactly the model store, as we all learnt from the UK commentators. Forstall bit of a surprise, but looks like Cook prefers team players to iconoclasts. I don't blame him; it's one thing reporting to Jobs, but imagine having a proto-Jobs working under you.. it's you or him

Yup, Dixons wasnt' exactly the model store, as we all learnt from the UK commentators. Forstall bit of a surprise, but looks like Cook prefers team players to iconoclasts. I don't blame him; it's one thing reporting to Jobs, but imagine having a proto-Jobs working under you.. it's you or him

I'm worried that putting too much on each of these exec's plates may dilute their effectiveness. Cue already has to battle studio execs for iTunes licensing. Ive has to manage all the different hardware form factors.

Mansfield - maybe that's cool. Could be an interesting "skunk works" division. Federighi - I assume he must have proteges working under him...the OS is easily the most complex of any technologies Apple works with, and mobile and desktop OS's are night and day.

Although perhaps not so much if the iPad and the Mac are getting closer and closer together by the day...

According to the Press Release Jony is taking over the HID. "Jony Ive will provide leadership and direction for Human Interface (HI) across the company in addition to his role as the leader of Industrial Design."

If Scott Forstall will be advising Tim Cook, it seems to me he will be leaving on his own. Also I like the fact that Craig Federighi will now be in charge of IOS and OSX. Looks like a positive for Apple only negative could be not having enough man power to handle everything.

what will become of all the faux leather in iOS? Jony Ive has expressed a distaste for it in the past. Will we just get a lot of faux aluminum in it's place?

All widgets will become semitransparent, bump-mapped liquid steel renders. The cocoa layout constraints API will enforce spacing of controls to multiples of 1.618 units. Tapping the glass touchpad will trigger a satisfying audio / synaptic feedback ackin to pressing a mouse button. The Mac version of Siri will remind you to take a break for tea & crumpets at 16:30 on weekdays.

Browett's departure is neither a surprise, nor a disappointment. I'm a little more uncertain about Forstall's departure, though I find the reassignment of duties interesting.

In particular, Human Interface responsibilities rolling up under Ive is intriguing, if only because it seems like something that might help keep him interested and engaged with Apple, rather than considering retirement or outside opportunities. I expect that a lot of his design skills, and credibility, will translate to Human Interface design, and he's doubtless learned a lot about the specialized aspects of Human Interface design from working at Apple as long as he has.

I'm fairly certain most people wanted John Browett gone within the first few weeks of his being there. Scott Forstall is interesting. There's been massive UI fights with him. So, while he's done great stuff, I can see this bring all or most of the Skeuomorphic fighting to an en. And hopefully, that will kill some of the outlandish furniture mimic-ing.

I happen to love the skeumorphic UIs presented on the iPhone and in OS X apps. I hope this is not the end of them. And I've been writing code longer than many Ars readers have been alive. I'd like to see more skeumorphic designs. For example, I use a pencil and paper for my to do lists because I savor the moment when I can cross the completed tasks out with a red pencil. It is about 1000 times as satisfying as clicking a check box. If they gave me a way to scratch out items in reminders in red lines with my finger or mouse, I'd love it. I might actually start using my computer for my to do list.

I do however believe Forstall was in a little over his head, from a management perspective. He didn't play well with others, and he let his team fall way short of what we come to expect from Apple.

I liked Scott, but hopefully this will bring an end to the dreaded skeuomorphism throughout Apples UI's.

I think this was a large part of his departure. Forstall and Ive have very different visions, and everyone within Apple knows it.

Forstall has been pushing for ever-more skeuomorphism. It's a tacky approach that clashes with Ive's minimalist hardware designs, and the two have been at loggerheads. The strange thing is that Jobs reportedly sided with Forstall's UI vision when he was at the helm, and Ive was told to just focus on hardware.

Now, Forstall is out and Ive is in charge of both industrial design and UI design. I think that's a big win for users.

I happen to love the skeumorphic UIs presented on the iPhone and in OS X apps. I hope this is not the end of them. And I've been writing code longer than many Ars readers have been alive. I'd like to see more skeumorphic designs. For example, I use a pencil and paper for my to do lists because I savor the moment when I can cross the completed tasks out with a red pencil. It is about 1000 times as satisfying as clicking a check box. If they gave me a way to scratch out items in reminders in red lines with my finger or mouse, I'd love it. I might actually start using my computer for my to do list.

I do however believe Forstall was in a little over his head, from a management perspective. He didn't play well with others, and he let his team fall way short of what we come to expect from Apple.

It's sort of like how you read those military officers evaluate each other, i.e. "Rommel/Patton/Stilwell was a superb commander up to the army level, but not the corps level" etc etc. I don't know you can really tell to an exact degree how someone can really "fit" in one position vs another but personality traits and how one processes tasks and information play a large role, I suppose.

By many accounts, Scott Forstall was a super-ambitious dick. I'm not surprised all that friction probably finally ended his tenure at Apple. That said, I think he was pretty integral to the company's success these last few years.

As for John, I, along with most folks wonder how he was ever hired. I would bet money that he was behind those terrible Genius ads during the Olympics. I am very glad that Tim took him behind the cube store and shot him, then dumped his body off Steve's new aluminum yacht. He is the antithesis of Apple's culture.

<snip>Forstall probably got booted for the Maps issues which sort of sucks but understandable since the software wasn't ready for many people. (I love it personally).

Do companies really shitcan execs for things like this?

People speculated that Papermaster got the boot for Antennagate, but I always thought doing so was throwing the baby out with the bathwater. That's summarily dismissing a ton of valuable experience over one mistake.

I am impressed Apple got rid of Brownett so soon. I worked under a crappy new hire manager who was booted quite quickly (was genuinely scatterbrained) but another crappy new hire CEO is still there several years later. It's harder to chuck crappy new senior managers, they are intelligent and cunning enough to get up the ladder and cling onto their jobs.

Forstall did a good job on osx, sad that he messed up on maps and Siri. But I guess looking back, osx also started out almost unusable on release. So a pattern there. Jobs stuck with him as apple was small and there were few other people with the skills. But now apple is gigantic and there are many other people with the skills to do maps and Siri, which are small projects compared to osx. Seems apple still rightly values forstall's experience and big picture advice.

I wonder if ive's new role is linked to finally finishing work on job's yacht? (I personally like it - something different & it looks like a space yacht from 100 years in the future) Now that's done, he can take over the interface.

Possibly the iPad mini is the last big new form factor to come for some time? Laptops are all retina now, iMacs too, Mac Pro won't change, Mac mini is done, iPhone will stay same design for next two years, etc. really looking fowards to Ive on human interface, it should be really something.

iOS is getting long in the tooth and apple may think it needs a big makeover to take it into the next 10 years. Osx is more or less done, but after using iOS for the last few years, many small things about osx are starting to seem unnecessary and over complex to me. MS has made a good start on revamping their OS - windows 9 will be very interesting. Looking fowards to Ive revamping iOS and taking osx into a new generation of integrated design.

I think the thing with Forstall is that he rubbed a lot of people too hard and the wrong way. His HUGE ego couldn't fit in a stadium. But then could Steve Job's ego?

I think the final straw was Bob Mansfield saying he was retiring. I think that Tim Cook heard things from other top people in Apple saying they were thinking about leaving too if Forstall was going to stay and Mansfield was leaving.

Notice the timing of this and when Forstall sold almost all (95%?). I think he found out then that he wasn't going to be around long term anymore.

And I think the "advisor" roll isn't really that at all. It is just a title to keep him out of the way but employed until he hits another stock option and/or to pay him hush money so he doesn't directly compete and also that he doesn't start saying bad things about Apple.

I'm serious that I think there is a tie-in with Mansfield leaving and then coming back plus the hard feelings Forstall has been creating all around Apple for years. As someone else said on another site, I think it was only a matter of time before Forstall was out after Steve Jobs, his protector, was gone.

I can't pretend to understand the scope of Forstall's responsibilities in any detail, but I was always impressed by him (in a superficial sense) when he gave presentations during product launches. He seemed to have a touch of Jobs' magnetic and infectious enthusiasm -- he seemed genuinely excited about the technology in a true geek sense and not just a corporate/marketing sense.

I always thought that all the skeumorphism came from Jobs, not Forestall, but then, I'm just guessing. I always thought of Forestall as the person responsible for keeping iOS lean, mean and functional despite the blinding speeds of its updates and the dizzying number of new features that were constantly added. Several times, iOS changed in ways that upset its foundations, but it never took a long time and everything always worked well. (Changing the functionality of the hardware-button double-click is just one elegant example; swiping down to get notifications is another, although that may have been ripped off from Android.)

I always thought of Avie Tevanian as the real OS X "wizard," and Forstall as his "acolyte"; but, again, I'm just guessing.

Was Forstall responsible for Maps? If yes, I wonder if he wants to leave ("I've made enough money and want to do other things") or got kicked out.

Scott was responsible for Maps, Siri and generally all of IOS to my understanding however Scott leaving now means he leaves a lot of money on the table.

He was promised 1,000,000 shares of Apple if he stayed until the year 2020. Half coming in 2015 and the other half in 2020, with today's stock price that's more than $600,000,000. Money is not everything but that's a lot of money to walk away from.

Let's hope this change means abandoning the idea of making Apple Retail more focused on upselling with miscellaneous peripherals, and mean actual improvement to the experience of being at the Apple store.

I dunno what those special Apple stores in NY and other big cities are like but the one at my local shopping mall sucks pretty bad. It's pretty much like going to Best Buy; the employees treat you like they're doing you a favor, it's crowded to the point where god help you if you need to get to the Genius Bar at the back of the store.

the employees treat you like they're doing you a favor, it's crowded to the point where god help you if you need to get to the Genius Bar at the back of the store.

It's always been like that at the local apple stores--the five in Houston are always elbow-to-elbow. Where Browett fucked up was in trying to transform the stores into an upper class Best Buy by trying to shovel high-margin addons onto every sale.

It really seems, at least to someone like me who is primarily a customer, that Apple didn't really need to *DO* anything to its stores. The formula was working. YOY growth was through the roof. They were sitting on the most valuable bunch of retail square footage in the world. All they had to do was have nice employees and clean stores and people just SHOWED UP and THREW MONEY AT THEM. Changing things to introduce the worst aspects of Tescos and Dixon's into the mix seems laughably stupid.